Fallow fruitfulness
IT IS hugely conventional to say “I love autumn,” but I do. I spent the first discernibly nippy, crisp weekend of it back at my family home, hacking at greenery in a field. The paddock has not received any real attention for a decade or so.
It lies next to the small patch where family pets have been buried. They lie there, in Kentish clay: Mutley, as devotedly loyal as his cartoon namesake, but much more benign; Jonty, to whom the concept of being full was alien; and Lily, in her day the fiercest of mousers.
The paddock’s unwieldiness was, I think, not unrelated to the purpose. We leave things ill-kempt when we are experiencing grief; and we like those acres where we grieve to reflect that — and, I suppose, to speak of new growth and life, despite the reality of death. A too well tended churchyard is a slightly unsettling, unnatural thing. Zealous lawn-mowers, beware.
Protected species
BUT back to the paddock: now, just as the nation emerges from mourning a monarch and must face hard decisions, so, too, must this small patch of Kent face the attention lavished on other parts of the garden. As I force the twin blades of the cutting device that my father has thrust at me around the trunk of the oak sapling, I reflect that it is young, new growth that we are cutting down.
Much church-speak around “pruning” — which, I suppose, is a way to make cutting sound cuddlier — focuses on removal of the old. In fact, as I make my way across the overgrown ground, I am largely in the business of nipping things in the bud.
The Church is less good at that. When something is known to be a risk in a garden, it is cut. In the Church, risks are often lauded, promoted, protected for decades. When it comes to the vineyard, a little more horticulturally accurate pruning would be no bad thing.
Grim reaper
NIPPING in the bud often pops into my head on the evening of the 28th day of the month. It’s then that Psalm 137 comes round in the Prayer Book. Alas, the end of the month is often too late to do much bud-nipping, other than through financial necessity.
More theologically, I think that it’s in the sense of confronting our sins while they are still young — as opposed to when they have grown strong and taken root — that the final phrases of that tricky piece of psalmody make best sense, from a spiritual point of view.
One can, however, understand why Boney M chose not to include the line about smashing children against stones when they recorded the rest of the psalm in “Rivers of Babylon”.
Travelling hopefully
BONEY M have been one among many consolations now that I have taken up the role of an occasional commuter — or, rather, reverse commuter.
Just as the crowds pour off the county and suburban trains into Charing Cross of an early morning, I am, quite often, ambling in the opposite direction in time for morning lessons. Very often, I am the only one in my carriage; so I take advantage of the time and space to listen to music, or to read, or to pray, while the townward services whizz past me with grimly set faces pressed up close to one another.
I am not always alone, however, and, on getting into the first carriage of the 07.10 the other day, I discovered that I was sharing it with three pigeons. Exactly where they got off, I couldn’t tell you: I left them speeding towards the south coast, merrily hopping about the seats. No doubt these early birds were en route to catch worms.
Bread on the waters
AUTUMN isn’t only a season for commuting, but for revisiting, too. All that work left abandoned over the summer months demands — like the psalmist in Psalm 17 (Morning Prayer, Day 3, of course) — that we incline our ears to it. I have revisited books, long since forgotten.
The autumn of life seems to be a popular period for revisiting people and places, too. This month I have had contact with a steady stream of former pupils of the school, now stooped and elderly, wanting to return and tell stories, and chat about what has changed and what stays the same. It is funny what stays with people from their schooldays — what has survived through to autumn, and what was nipped in the bud.
One older gentleman told me a story of retained knowledge from a former generation. An old boy of the school found himself in command of the first tank battalion to break through enemy lines up into Belgium, acutely aware that a Panzer division was somewhere in the vicinity. As he advanced slowly up a country lane, he noticed an elderly priest dive for cover in the hedgerow ahead.
Hoping that the cleric might be of some use in locating the enemy, he pulled up next to the hedge to quiz him. The only issue was that he lacked any French or Flemish, and the priest lacked any English.
Suddenly, some buried knowledge of Latin from the spring of his schooldays burst through, and he addressed the hedge accordingly: “Ubi Germani sunt?” “Germani in ponte sunt!” came the reply from the hedge. So it was that the Nazi counter-attack was nipped in the bud.
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie is a teacher and writer.